Monday, October 11, 2010

Sega just released the PSP game of the hit Anime series K-On!, will the game promises a great music rhythm gameplay or will it only pleases the fans of the series?

A fair warning though, as there is no English release for the game, expect a lot of Japanese texts and you will have a bit of hard time to navigate through the game if you are not prepared, you can refer to this link for a guide to navigate the game.

If you've been playing the Project Diva series (which is also developed by Sega) you'll notice some similarities to it, such as customizable characters and room and MTV-like videos in every song. The gameplay is the same to any music rhythm games; while the music is playing, you press the right a button at the right time, make consecutive hits to make a combo and your score goes higher, make a lot of misses and it's game over. You can use powerups during the game to boost your performance.

What's good to the game (and also rather interesting) is that every character (5 in total) have different button inputs which correspond to their musical instruments, as if you are really playing the instrument itself. aside from the rhythm gameplay, there's the Sing mode where you create your own music video, it's only difficult to navigate as it is full of Japanese text. Another plus to the game is that it has a multiplayer option via Ad-Hoc (up to 5 players) to play with your friends, which some games like Rockband Unplugged lacks.

The graphics is also quite similar to the Project Diva game, although not that spectacular. You can customize your characters with different costumes which you can acquire as you progress the game, you can also interact at the menu screen where there's a chance to open an event scene will recreates a scene from the Anime.

The tracklist offers 19 songs from almost all of the soundtracks of the first season, the tracklist is really disappointing as it will only a very short gameplay time (you can complete the whole tracklist in just around 1-2 hours) and there is no DLC for additional songs. And the sound is pretty weak even if you maxed out the volume both the PSP and the game, so it's best to use a headphone and stay in a less noisy environment while playing.

Overall K-On! Houkago Live is a still good game, despite having very few songs. And this one of those rhythm games that you can enjoy with friends. Fans of the series and rhythm games will enjoy this game.